OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Force-Directed Layout of Order Diagrams using Dimensional Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2021
Year: 2021

Order diagrams allow human analysts to understand and analyze structural properties of ordered data. While an experienced expert can create easily readable order diagrams, the automatic generation of those remains a hard task. In this work, we adapt force-directed approaches, which are known to generate aesthetically-pleasing drawings of graphs, to the realm of order diagrams. Our algorithm ReDraw thereby embeds the order in a high dimension and then iteratively reduces the dimension until a two-dimensional drawing is achieved. To improve aesthetics, this reduction is equipped with two force-directed steps where one optimizes on distances of nodes and the other on distances of lines in order to satisfy a set of a priori fixed conditions. By respecting an invariant about the vertical position of the elements in each step of our algorithm we ensure that the resulting drawings satisfy all necessary properties of order diagrams. Finally, we present the results of a user study to demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms comparable approaches on drawings of lattices with a high degree of distributivity.
Mask Guided Attention For Fine-Grained Patchy Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, we present a novel mask guided attention (MGA) method for fine-grained patchy image classification. The key challenge of fine-grained patchy image classification lies in two folds, ultra-fine-grained inter-category variances among objects and very few data available for training. This motivates us to consider employing more useful supervision signal to train a discriminative model within limited training samples. Specifically, the proposed MGA integrates a pre-trained semantic segmentation model that produces auxiliary supervision signal, i.e., patchy attention mask, enabling a discriminative representation learning. The patchy attention mask drives the classifier to filter out the insignificant parts of images (e.g., common features between different categories), which enhances the robustness of MGA for the fine-grained patchy image classification. We verify the effectiveness of our method on three publicly available patchy image datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our MGA method achieves superior performance on three datasets compared with the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our ablation study shows that MGA improves the accuracy by 2.25% and 2% on the SoyCultivarVein and BtfPIS datasets, indicating its practicality towards solving the fine-grained patchy image classification.
Designing a Binary Clock using logic gates
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2021
Year: 2021

Wristwatches have been a common fashion accessory addition for several people. However, the concept of using a seven-segment digital display or sometimes, even an analog indicator hasn't changed for a number of years. This project aims to test and design a binary clock, also referred to as 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1 clock or even 8, 4, 2, 1 clock (due to their display configuration), that could change this everlasting display for watches. Specifically, digital logic and design engineers would find interest in this topic due to the sophistication involved in reading-out the time. This project will do so using by showing each decimal digit of sexagesimal time as a binary value. This design will be primarily functioning on logic gates and would involve the use of several basic components that include, but are not limited to, integrated circuits (or ICs), Light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and resistors.
Using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Internet of Things (IoT) for localized surface temperature forecasting in an urban environment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The rising temperature is one of the key indicators of a warming climate, and it can cause extensive stress to biological systems as well as built structures. Due to the heat island effect, it is most severe in urban environments compared to other landscapes due to the decrease in vegetation associated with a dense human-built environment. It is essential to adequately monitor the local temperature dynamics to mitigate risks associated with increasing temperatures, which can include short term strategy to protect people and animals, to long term strategy to how to build a new structure and cope with extreme events. Observed temperature is also a very important input for atmospheric models, and accurate data can lead to better future forecasts. Ambient temperature collected at ground level can have a higher variability when compared to regional weather forecasts, which fail to capture the local dynamics. There remains a clear need for an accurate air temperature prediction at the sub-urban scale at high temporal and spatial resolution. This research proposed a framework based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) deep learning network to generate day-ahead hourly temperature forecast with high spatial resolution. A case study is shown which uses historical in-situ observations and Internet of Things (IoT) observations for New York City, USA. By leveraging the historical air temperature data from in-situ observations, the LSTM model can be exposed to more historical patterns that might not be present in the IoT observations. Meanwhile, by using IoT observations, the spatial resolution of air temperature predictions is significantly improved.
A Baseline Model for Software Effort Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Software effort estimation (SEE) is a core activity in all software processes and development lifecycles. A range of increasingly complex methods has been considered in the past 30 years for the prediction of effort, often with mixed and contradictory results. The comparative assessment of effort prediction methods has therefore become a common approach when considering how best to predict effort over a range of project types. Unfortunately, these assessments use a variety of sampling methods and error measurements, making comparison with other work difficult. This article proposes an automatically transformed linear model (ATLM) as a suitable baseline model for comparison against SEE methods. ATLM is simple yet performs well over a range of different project types. In addition, ATLM may be used with mixed numeric and categorical data and requires no parameter tuning. It is also deterministic, meaning that results obtained are amenable to replication. These and other arguments for using ATLM as a baseline model are presented, and a reference implementation described and made available. We suggest that ATLM should be used as a baseline of effort prediction quality for all future model comparisons in SEE.
Resource Allocation and Scheduling in Non-coherent User-centric Cell-free MIMO
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

We study the problem of user-scheduling and resource allocation in distributed multi-user, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks implementing user-centric clustering and non-coherent transmission. We formulate a weighted sum-rate maximization problem which can provide user proportional fairness. As in this setup, users can be served by many transmitters, user scheduling is particularly difficult. To solve this issue, we use block coordinate descent, fractional programming, and compressive sensing to construct an algorithm that performs user-scheduling and beamforming. Our results show that the proposed framework provides an 8- to 10-fold gain in the long-term user spectral efficiency compared to benchmark schemes such as round-robin scheduling. Furthermore, we quantify the performance loss due to imperfect channel state information and pilot training overhead using a defined area-based pilot-reuse factor.
AutoPilot: Automating SoC Design Space Exploration for SWaP Constrained Autonomous UAVs
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Building domain-specific accelerators for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is challenging due to a lack of systematic methodology for designing onboard compute. Balancing a computing system for a UAV requires considering both the cyber (e.g., sensor rate, compute performance) and physical (e.g., payload weight) characteristics that affect overall performance. Iterating over the many component choices results in a combinatorial explosion of the number of possible combinations: from 10s of thousands to billions, depending on implementation details. Manually selecting combinations of these components is tedious and expensive. To navigate the {cyber-physical design space} efficiently, we introduce \emph{AutoPilot}, a framework that automates full-system UAV co-design. AutoPilot uses Bayesian optimization to navigate a large design space and automatically select a combination of autonomy algorithm and hardware accelerator while considering the cross-product effect of other cyber and physical UAV components. We show that the AutoPilot methodology consistently outperforms general-purpose hardware selections like Xavier NX and Jetson TX2, as well as dedicated hardware accelerators built for autonomous UAVs, across a range of representative scenarios (three different UAV types and three deployment environments). Designs generated by AutoPilot increase the number of missions on average by up to 2.25x, 1.62x, and 1.43x for nano, micro, and mini-UAVs respectively over baselines. Our work demonstrates the need for holistic full-UAV co-design to achieve maximum overall UAV performance and the need for automated flows to simplify the design process for autonomous cyber-physical systems.
Zero Training Overhead Portfolios for Learning to Solve Combinatorial Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

There has been an increasing interest in harnessing deep learning to tackle combinatorial optimization (CO) problems in recent years. Typical CO deep learning approaches leverage the problem structure in the model architecture. Nevertheless, the model selection is still mainly based on the conventional machine learning setting. Due to the discrete nature of CO problems, a single model is unlikely to learn the problem entirely. We introduce ZTop, which stands for Zero Training Overhead Portfolio, a simple yet effective model selection and ensemble mechanism for learning to solve combinatorial problems. ZTop is inspired by algorithm portfolios, a popular CO ensembling strategy, particularly restart portfolios, which periodically restart a randomized CO algorithm, de facto exploring the search space with different heuristics. We have observed that well-trained models acquired in the same training trajectory, with similar top validation performance, perform well on very different validation instances. Following this observation, ZTop ensembles a set of well-trained models, each providing a unique heuristic with zero training overhead, and applies them, sequentially or in parallel, to solve the test instances. We show how ZTopping, i.e., using a ZTop ensemble strategy with a given deep learning approach, can significantly improve the performance of the current state-of-the-art deep learning approaches on three prototypical CO domains, the hardest unique-solution Sudoku instances, challenging routing problems, and the graph maximum cut problem, as well as on multi-label classification, a machine learning task with a large combinatorial label space.
Two-Stage Augmentation and Adaptive CTC Fusion for Improved Robustness of Multi-Stream End-to-End ASR
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Performance degradation of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system is commonly observed when the test acoustic condition is different from training. Hence, it is essential to make ASR systems robust against various environmental distortions, such as background noises and reverberations. In a multi-stream paradigm, improving robustness takes account of handling a variety of unseen single-stream conditions and inter-stream dynamics. Previously, a practical two-stage training strategy was proposed within multi-stream end-to-end ASR, where Stage-2 formulates the multi-stream model with features from Stage-1 Universal Feature Extractor (UFE). In this paper, as an extension, we introduce a two-stage augmentation scheme focusing on mismatch scenarios: Stage-1 Augmentation aims to address single-stream input varieties with data augmentation techniques; Stage-2 Time Masking applies temporal masks on UFE features of randomly selected streams to simulate diverse stream combinations. During inference, we also present adaptive Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) fusion with the help of hierarchical attention mechanisms. Experiments have been conducted on two datasets, DIRHA and AMI, as a multi-stream scenario. Compared with the previous training strategy, substantial improvements are reported with relative word error rate reductions of 29.7-59.3% across several unseen stream combinations.
DeepReduce: A Sparse-tensor Communication Framework for Distributed Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Sparse tensors appear frequently in distributed deep learning, either as a direct artifact of the deep neural network's gradients, or as a result of an explicit sparsification process. Existing communication primitives are agnostic to the peculiarities of deep learning; consequently, they impose unnecessary communication overhead. This paper introduces DeepReduce, a versatile framework for the compressed communication of sparse tensors, tailored for distributed deep learning. DeepReduce decomposes sparse tensors in two sets, values and indices, and allows both independent and combined compression of these sets. We support a variety of common compressors, such as Deflate for values, or run-length encoding for indices. We also propose two novel compression schemes that achieve superior results: curve fitting-based for values and bloom filter-based for indices. DeepReduce is orthogonal to existing gradient sparsifiers and can be applied in conjunction with them, transparently to the end-user, to significantly lower the communication overhead. As proof of concept, we implement our approach on Tensorflow and PyTorch. Our experiments with large real models demonstrate that DeepReduce transmits fewer data and imposes lower computational overhead than existing methods, without affecting the training accuracy.
Multispectral Object Detection with Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Object detection in natural scenes can be a challenging task. In many real-life situations, the visible spectrum is not suitable for traditional computer vision tasks. Moving outside the visible spectrum range, such as the thermal spectrum or the near-infrared (NIR) images, is much more beneficial in low visibility conditions, NIR images are very helpful for understanding the object's material quality. In this work, we have taken images with both the Thermal and NIR spectrum for the object detection task. As multi-spectral data with both Thermal and NIR is not available for the detection task, we needed to collect data ourselves. Data collection is a time-consuming process, and we faced many obstacles that we had to overcome. We train the YOLO v3 network from scratch to detect an object from multi-spectral images. Also, to avoid overfitting, we have done data augmentation and tune hyperparameters.
Worst-Case Execution Time Calculation for Query-Based Monitors by Witness Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Runtime monitoring plays a key role in the assurance of modern intelligent cyber-physical systems, which are frequently data-intensive and safety-critical. While graph queries can serve as an expressive yet formally precise specification language to capture the safety properties of interest, there are no timeliness guarantees for such auto-generated runtime monitoring programs, which prevents their use in a real-time setting. While worst-case execution time (WCET) bounds derived by existing static WCET estimation techniques are safe, they may not be tight as they are unable to exploit domain-specific (semantic) information about the input models. This paper presents a semantic-aware WCET analysis method for data-driven monitoring programs derived from graph queries. The method incorporates results obtained from low-level timing analysis into the objective function of a modern graph solver. This allows the systematic generation of input graph models up to a specified size (referred to as witness models) for which the monitor is expected to take the most time to complete. Hence the estimated execution time of the monitors on these graphs can be considered as safe and tight WCET. Additionally, we perform a set of experiments with query-based programs running on a real-time platform over a set of generated models to investigate the relationship between execution times and their estimates, and compare WCET estimates produced by our approach with results from two well-known timing analyzers, aiT and OTAWA.
Sparse Reward Exploration via Novelty Search and Emitters
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Reward-based optimization algorithms require both exploration, to find rewards, and exploitation, to maximize performance. The need for efficient exploration is even more significant in sparse reward settings, in which performance feedback is given sparingly, thus rendering it unsuitable for guiding the search process. In this work, we introduce the SparsE Reward Exploration via Novelty and Emitters (SERENE) algorithm, capable of efficiently exploring a search space, as well as optimizing rewards found in potentially disparate areas. Contrary to existing emitters-based approaches, SERENE separates the search space exploration and reward exploitation into two alternating processes. The first process performs exploration through Novelty Search, a divergent search algorithm. The second one exploits discovered reward areas through emitters, i.e. local instances of population-based optimization algorithms. A meta-scheduler allocates a global computational budget by alternating between the two processes, ensuring the discovery and efficient exploitation of disjoint reward areas. SERENE returns both a collection of diverse solutions covering the search space and a collection of high-performing solutions for each distinct reward area. We evaluate SERENE on various sparse reward environments and show it compares favorably to existing baselines.
Parallel Hyperedge Replacement String Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2021
Year: 2021

There are many open questions surrounding the characterisation of groups with context-sensitive word problem. Only in 2018 was it shown that all finitely generated virtually Abelian groups have multiple context-free word problems, and it is a long-standing open question as to where to place the word problems of hyperbolic groups in the formal language hierarchy. In this paper, we introduce a new language class called the parallel hyperedge replacement string languages, show that it contains all multiple context-free and ET0L languages, and lay down the foundations for future work that may be able to place the word problems of many hyperbolic groups in this class.
Spell Correction for Azerbaijani Language using Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Spell correction is used to detect and correct orthographic mistakes in texts. Most of the time, traditional dictionary lookup with string similarity methods is suitable for the languages that have a less complex structure such as the English language. However, the Azerbaijani language has a more complex structure and due to its morphological structure, the derivation of words is plenty that several words are derived from adding suffices, affixes to the words. Therefore, in this paper sequence to sequence model with an attention mechanism is used to develop spelling correction for Azerbaijani. Total 12000 wrong and correct sentence pairs used for training, and the model is tested on 1000 real-world misspelled words and F1-score results are 75% for distance 0, 90% for distance 1, and 96% for distance 2.
ORCID-linked labeled data for evaluating author name disambiguation at scale
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2021
Year: 2021

How can we evaluate the performance of a disambiguation method implemented on big bibliographic data? This study suggests that the open researcher profile system, ORCID, can be used as an authority source to label name instances at scale. This study demonstrates the potential by evaluating the disambiguation performances of Author-ity2009 (which algorithmically disambiguates author names in MEDLINE) using 3 million name instances that are automatically labeled through linkage to 5 million ORCID researcher profiles. Results show that although ORCID-linked labeled data do not effectively represent the population of name instances in Author-ity2009, they do effectively capture the 'high precision over high recall' performances of Author-ity2009. In addition, ORCID-linked labeled data can provide nuanced details about the Author-ity2009's performance when name instances are evaluated within and across ethnicity categories. As ORCID continues to be expanded to include more researchers, labeled data via ORCID-linkage can be improved in representing the population of a whole disambiguated data and updated on a regular basis. This can benefit author name disambiguation researchers and practitioners who need large-scale labeled data but lack resources for manual labeling or access to other authority sources for linkage-based labeling. The ORCID-linked labeled data for Author-tiy2009 are publicly available for validation and reuse.
Transductive Zero-Shot Learning by Decoupled Feature Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we address zero-shot learning (ZSL), the problem of recognizing categories for which no labeled visual data are available during training. We focus on the transductive setting, in which unlabelled visual data from unseen classes is available. State-of-the-art paradigms in ZSL typically exploit generative adversarial networks to synthesize visual features from semantic attributes. We posit that the main limitation of these approaches is to adopt a single model to face two problems: 1) generating realistic visual features, and 2) translating semantic attributes into visual cues. Differently, we propose to decouple such tasks, solving them separately. In particular, we train an unconditional generator to solely capture the complexity of the distribution of visual data and we subsequently pair it with a conditional generator devoted to enrich the prior knowledge of the data distribution with the semantic content of the class embeddings. We present a detailed ablation study to dissect the effect of our proposed decoupling approach, while demonstrating its superiority over the related state-of-the-art.
In-Loop Meta-Learning with Gradient-Alignment Reward
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

At the heart of the standard deep learning training loop is a greedy gradient step minimizing a given loss. We propose to add a second step to maximize training generalization. To do this, we optimize the loss of the next training step. While computing the gradient for this generally is very expensive and many interesting applications consider non-differentiable parameters (e.g. due to hard samples), we present a cheap-to-compute and memory-saving reward, the gradient-alignment reward (GAR), that can guide the optimization. We use this reward to optimize multiple distributions during model training. First, we present the application of GAR to choosing the data distribution as a mixture of multiple dataset splits in a small scale setting. Second, we show that it can successfully guide learning augmentation strategies competitive with state-of-the-art augmentation strategies on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100.